Once again, Google is headed back to the drawing board to rethink its healthcare strategy. As first reported by Business Insider, the tech giant is dissolving its single, unified Google Health division, founded in 2018, in favor of a distributed approach to building health products. The head of the division, David Feinberg, is leaving the company, while an unknown proportion of Google Health employees will be sent to other teams at Google (like Search and Fitbit) to work on specific services, according to Google’s AI head Jeff Dean. It’s a messy change for what was already a messy initiative. Tech…
Author: Mike Harrison
With official Food and Drug Administration approval, the Pfizer / BioNTech mRNA COVID-19 vaccine can now be marketed as Comirnaty in the US, great news for general vaccine acceptance, sure, but also anyone who loves to fixate on bizarre drug names. Comirnaty is apparently supposed to be a portmanteau of several words — community, immunity, COVID-19, and mRNA — Fierce Pharma writes. The branding was produced for Pfizer-BioNTech by the Brand Institute — “The World’s #1 Naming Company” — and while it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, it is at least shorter than most drug names. On the other…
The Food and Drug Administration granted full approval to the Pfizer / BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, another landmark in the historic immunization campaign. The vaccine was previously available to people over the age of 12 in the United States under an emergency use authorization. Now, it’s officially licensed in the United States. With full approval, Pfizer and BioNTech can directly market the shot to consumers. The approval may also push more companies and schools to mandate vaccinations. While it’s legal for them to require vaccinations under an emergency authorization, some have been reluctant to do so. The companies needed to provide…
Samsung devices that support Samsung Pay can now store digital versions of users’ COVID-19 vaccination cards, through a partnership with healthcare nonprofit The Commons Project, the smartphone company announced. Users have to first download the free CommonHealth app from the Google Play store, and follow the instructions to access their COVID-19 vaccine record, from participating pharmacies, health systems, and health providers (not all providers are connected to the system yet). Once the user has access to their COVID-19 credential within the CommonHealth app, they can add it to their Samsung Pay wallet. The Covid-19 Vaccine Pass will then be available…
VidCon announced that its US convention, scheduled in late October, has been canceled due to concerns over the increasing number of COVID cases. The organizers, however, say that VidCon 2022 is scheduled for June 22nd-25th and that non single-day tickets for the 2021 event will automatically transfer to the new event. VidCon has noted, though, that the event next year won’t necessarily have the same guests and activities planned for this year. Last year, VidCon 2020 was canceled with hopes of holding the event in the fall, which then turned into hopes of holding the event in summer 2021. Those…
When American experts first started to worry that COVID-19 vaccines weren’t working quite as well against delta as they did against earlier coronavirus strains, they didn’t have much domestic data to go on. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was only collecting data on post-vaccination COVID-19 cases if they led to hospitalization or death — the agency wasn’t doing big-picture tracking of COVID-19 in vaccinated people. Only a few states and counties were collecting and publicizing that information. The CDC was doing some analysis, but it wasn’t sharing the information quickly, frustrating experts who hoped for a more dynamic…
In late October 2020, the University of Vermont Health Network was hit by a ransomware attack. The system couldn’t access electronic health records for nearly a month. Every computer at UVM Medical Center was infected with malware. Hospitals in the network delayed chemotherapy and mammogram appointments, just as COVID-19 cases in the United States started to tick upward in what would become an enormous winter wave. Intuitively, cyberattacks on hospitals seem like they’d be dangerous for patients. Shutting down computer systems shuts off access to patient scans, can lock physicians out of tools they need to provide care, and creates…
One year after getting diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, a heart condition that causes an irregular heartbeat, a 70-year-old woman was back for another diagnosis: new-onset health anxiety triggered by her smartwatch. Despite not having concerning symptoms, the patient became more and more preoccupied with and worried about notifications from her watch. Over the one-year period, she took 916 ECG recordings through her device. That patient isn’t an outlier, says Lindsey Rosman, an assistant professor of medicine in the division of cardiology at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, who wrote about the case in a new paper. She…
Jabra’s Enhance Plus are a new pair of true wireless earbuds aimed at helping people who experience “mild-to-moderate” hearing loss. They’re meant as a half-step towards a more traditional hearing aid solution, for people who might not be ready to wear a device all day. The Enhance Plus will be released first in the US at the end of the year, and will be sold through licensed hearing care professionals at a price that’s yet to be announced. Although Jabra is perhaps best known for its true wireless earbuds like the Elite 85T, its parent company GN Group has a…
Everyone in the United States who got a COVID-19 vaccine will need a booster shot to keep protection from fading, the Biden administration said today. Vaccinated Americans will be offered boosters eight months after their initial shots. Plans are that the first round will be offered in September and will go to nursing home residents, health care workers, and others vaccinated early. “Current protection against severe disease, hospitalization, and death could diminish in the months ahead, especially among those who are at higher risk or were vaccinated during the earlier phases of the vaccination rollout,” federal health officials said in…